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Comment: Spyware (Score 3, Interesting) 324

by Foresto (#39797709) Attached to: Phoronix Confirms GNU/Linux Steam and Source Engine Clients

The rest of the comment I won't even bother to address. Just not worth my time explaining debugging and such.

The rest of the comment was about one of the two major problems I have with Steam, and I happen to know more than a little about software development, so I'm going to speak up about that one point: The ability to collect runtime information is both very helpful for debugging and very invasive to the host system. Give the owner of the system the ability to enable it only if & when it is needed. Problem solved. Insisting on having it running at all times makes it spyware, which is rather telling about the publisher's intentions.

Comment: But is it fun? (Score 0) 158

by Foresto (#38030982) Attached to: <em>The Elder Scrolls</em> Return With <em>Skyrim</em>

I tried to play though Oblivion. I really did. But it was so mind-numbingly boring that I just couldn't bring myself to waste any more of my life in front of it. It currently rates at 94 on metacritic, which tells me that either some poor sods liked it or some creeps accepted money to say they liked it. Skyrim has the same rating. Is it any better?

I enjoyed Dragon Age: Origins quite a bit. Hiring decent writers and actors really seems to make a difference. Go fig. Too bad they blew the sequel.

Comment: waiting for a suitable replacement (Score 1) 213

by Foresto (#32380068) Attached to: XBMC Discontinues Xbox Support

I'll be ready to retire my xbox as soon as I find a suitable, affordable replacement. I'm hoping for a diskless nettop with nVidia VDPAU Feature Set C to arrive some time this year. I imagine that ought to run the latest greatest XBMC nicely. Until then, I think I'll continue hobbling along with this poor old nearly-abandoned xbox.

Comment: Even better, read the test results yourself. (Score 1) 189

by Foresto (#31312282) Attached to: BlackBerry Bold Tops Radiation Ranking

Many of their phone-specific pages cite the manufacturer as the only data source. This includes a phone I'm playing with at the moment, which happens to have one of the worst SAR ratings on the ewg.org list. (Worse than the Blackberry.) I followed their link, and it brought me to a user manual, which did in fact show the same values shown on the list.

Call me paranoid, but that didn't really satisfy me. For one thing, I don't trust user manuals all that much when it comes to fine details that might have changed since they were written. For another, this phone supports several different radio frequencies, including Wi-Fi and several different GSM bands, yet the manual and ewg.org fail to reflect this with multiple SAR values. So, I looked up the FCC ID for my phone and followed it to the FCC's radiation report on that model. What I found was much more informative.

As you might expect, the FCC's SAR measurements showed quite a range of values, depending on which radio is in use, which channel is in use, and how the phone is held. According to this data, my particular phone habits and service provider should yield around half the SAR that was reported by ewg.org, comparable to their best-rated models.

This exercise was interesting, and set my mind at ease a little, but I'm still going to use a wired headset whenever possible. Again, call me paranoid if you like. There simply hasn't been enough time for us to observe the long-term effects of having a microwave broadcast antenna plastered to our heads, and I don't trust studies that claim all is well when they're funded by the cell phone industry.

Some of you might find this US Senate hearing interesting:
http://appropriations.senate.gov/webcasts.cfm?method=webcasts.view&id=2a7f2e87-68a0-48a3-b16b-08ac1b98cc42
http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/288879-1
http://www.mapcruzin.com/news/cell-phone-health-effects-hearing.htm

An idealist is one who helps the other fellow to make a profit. -- Henry Ford

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